Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year for 2016

Announced at Summit, SEAQ Servicios’ Felipe Ceballos was named the Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year for 2016. Felipe Ceballos used the knowledge he gained on his journey becoming an Red Hat Certified Engineer to solve complex problems for the benefit of SEAQ’s customers.

Certification exams at Summit

2016 Summit Red Hat Certified Professionals Reception

The annual Red Hat Certified Professional event was held in a luxury suite at the San Francisco Giants Baseball Stadium. Guests watched the San Francisco Giants play local rivals, the Oakland A’s. Guests also got to meet Felipe Ceballos the 2016 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year.

Break-out session

Ken Goetz, Vice President of Global Learning Services, led a break-out session on how IT transformation is talent transformation and how Red Hat Training and Certification is trying to help solve customer challengesthat get in the way of talent transformation.

In his introduction, Ken Goetz said, “when we discuss the journey organizations take to adopt next generation IT, the focus tends to be on the technology and the product. How does it work? What benefits does it convey? Does it align with my IT strategy? But somehow we forget about the people that make it all possible. The speed and success with which an organization can adopt these IT strategies is tied to the strength of that organization’s IT talent. Ultimately, it’s people who must implement, use, administer and maintain these technologies. If those people lack the prerequisite skills, you’re stuck at square one. This is why talent or skills is so often listed at the top of the list of “barriers to adoption” around emerging technology.”

He then went on to say that the three reasons that talent and skills are listed as one of the main barriers to adoption to emerging technology are:

The unemployment rate in IT is close to zero. Companies are having to go to great lengths to recruit, retain and attract talent amid strong competition.

The fast pace of change in technology innovation, especially around emerging technology. 71% of IT managers say it is a challenge to keep their team’s skills up to date throughout the year. Point classroom training will always remain an important part of upskilling, but companies cannot keep up through classroom training alone. It’s too difficult and the opportunity cost is high, and 79% of content learned is forgotten within 31 days.

The industry hasn’t done a good enough job articulating the value of training. 1/2 of IT managers say it is difficult to know whether training has actually helped their team.

Red Hat Training is trying to solve these challenges our customers face by being committed to rolling out new content regularly, done correctly, and through continuous delivery anywhere in our technology space in the market. As Ken put it, “But while it’s great to release new content, if we aren’t doing enough to make that content broadly available and consumable, we’re not making a dent in solving those challenges.” Availability is another key way that Red Hat Training and Certification is trying to accomplish to solve our customer challenges.

To that end, Red Hat Training and Certification launched Red Hat Learning Subscription a little over a year ago. This annual subscription gives users access to all of our online content and the labs needed to actually practice and understand products the way they are used in the real world. Ken Goetz then announced that Red Hat Learning Subscription – Standard is now available in North America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

“Standard takes your education to the next level by providing not only a combination of online courses, videos, and hands-on labs, but also expert seminars, instructor office hours, access to certification exams*, learning paths leading to certifications, and ongoing access to the latest curriculum, including emerging technology courses such as OpenStack®.”

Ken Goetz ended the session by inviting a customer, Richard A. Ray II, a HPC System Administrator from the High-Performance Computing Operations team at National Center for Computational Sciences in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to come up for a live Q&A interview. Richard Ray II talked about his current role, how being trained is important to him and his ability to do the work, and how gets trained and certified to “hone up on the new features”.

Red Hat Consulting

Discovery Sessions

The Red Hat Consulting Discovery Session Series launched with a powerful start on Tuesday morning in Moscone West. With standing room only in the theater-style Discovery Zone, Red Hat consultants and architects led discussions with the attendees, probing them to participate in the conversation and delve deep into their most challenging obstacles. The following sessions not only had fantastic attendance, but delivered problem-solving insights gleaned from the Red Hat experts. For links to our experts’ presentations, see below.

To learn how open source technology can generate value and transform your IT, book your own discovery session by contacting discoverysession@redhat.com.

Open Innovation Labs

As Summit attendees buzzed around Moscone West, Red Hat Open Innovation Labs hosted a pop-up stand in front of the Consulting Discovery Zone. Director of Open Innovation Labs, Mike Walker, and other Red Hat Experts were present to talk through ways participants could jump-start innovation with Red Hat’s push-button infrastructure. Attendees were also able to build their own technology stack, where they could mix and matchservices, tools, and infrastructure services to meet their application development needs.

Thank you to everyone that attended any of the Red Hat Services events. We hope you enjoyed it. If you were unable to attend this year, we hope to see you next year in Boston for Red Hat Summit 2017.